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Patience is a virtue – My Facebook news feed

I log on to Facebook and scroll down through my news feed.

The pictures and posts of friends that bring a smile to my face, to know that they’re happily enjoying their weekends in different cities (or just showing off!), travellogues of my friends, pages which share wonderful poems, quotes and art, family members who have just joined Facebook and trying to stalk me, beautiful posts from my school teachers, shares on my timeline about some crazy thing which reminded them of me, those new random messages where creeps ask questions like “Hey! Do you like Dosa ?” (how jobless are they!), news portals which share sensible news articles, friends changing their profile pictures or just re-cycling their old ones to get more likes, and hilarious memes which troll every thing and everybody in the world! Some of these I enjoy and the rest I’m learning to tolerate.

But there are a few things that I just cannot tolerate. These so called “social news and entertainment” pages, posting really annoying articles which take up a lot of space in my news feed!

It is filled with ‘Listicles’!Great! Listicles tell me 17 weird reasons to do (or not do) something. These 17 commandments I will always remember because these listicles collectively form my new pocket bible! And mostly it will be an absurd prime number like 17, 19 or even 43, maybe because using simple numbers like 5 or 10 is too mainstream for them. These articles are very intellectually stimulating. Recently, I learnt from a listicle that I have all the ’34 signs that tell me I’m from Tamil Nadu’! How fascinating! I never knew this for all the 22 years of my life!

I’m going to write a listicle now. And it goes like this – ‘7 annoying listicles that should be wiped off from the internet, so that everyone lives peacefully ever after!’

“20 things you should be doing in your 20s!”

I SHOULD be doing? I should? Then I’m not going to do even one thing on that list, thank you.

Ten? The whole world knows that there’s only ONE reason that makes you one. Why are you even writing such things!

“15 signs that Samosa is the true love of your life”

Stahp. Just stahp!

Oh, and about those GIFs! The tiny little snippets compliment the content in these listicles amazingly well! But now, I guess they just ran out of them? The same few GIFs from ‘Mean Girls’ are being used a million times. Also to Indian-ise the content, they throw in Kareena Kapoor’s GIFs from Jab We Met for the thousandth time. Most of them are not even connected with the content. When I’m reading an article, these GIFs keep playing repeatedly and the people inside these little rectangles are like ‘Dory’ from Finding Nemo – retarded and stuck! These are just randomly placed to create the whoop in their so called scoop?!

Kareena Kapoor in ‘Jab We Met’

Also, there are so many things that I never would’ve come to know if not for those random quizzes on Facebook. I now know that I was a unicorn in my past life, found out that my celebrity doppelganger is Madonna, the sorting hat told me that I belong to Gryffindor, also, if I were an electric appliance I would be a microwave oven and in the Pokemon world I am Charmander! Who would’ve even thought!

Recently, there are these cheesy and boring stories (sometimes very unintentionally funny) written by girls anonymously, called ‘#MyStory’. One article was titled, “The moment I knew he was moving to another city, I left him. And I don’t regret it!” This is just a lame way of re-phrasing these words:”I dumped him because I’m too lazy to make my long-distance relationship work”. *Drama queen alert* Seriously? Why do these stories get featured?!

What else do I see? Clickbaits, clickbaits everywhere! There is this one link which screams, “This grandma had a bottle of ketchup. What she did next…”
Ah, well, who cares? And so, I scroll down further, looking at other ‘important’ stuff on Facebook. I give a ‘like’ for that thing which looks like a hybrid between a pizza and a cake and scroll down again. But wait! My brain is exploding. ‘What did dear old grandma do with that ketchup bottle?!’ And so, I scroll back up and studiously click on that link! Only to find out that it isn’t a single page article but a gallery slideshow. I’ve to click the right arrow every time to go to the next picture. And with my super speedy WiFi, it takes forever. After 20 clicks and 5 minutes, turns out this grandma used this ketchup bottle to make a tissue paper stand. There goes five minutes of my life that I can never get back. As a victim (read as ‘being evil’), I re-share that grandma link saying, “This is too cool. We all should try this with our ketchup bottle to increase the GDP of our country”. Few of my dear Facebook friends will also click this link and experience the same mental torture. But wait…hold on… Do I see a like for this link that I shared right now? Really?! Okay, now my trust in this Facebook kingdom has vanished. The reason that such articles are posted in the first place is because people really do like mediocrity? Are they so overworked that they only prefer ‘mediocre-reads’ and not ‘good, light-reads’?

As these thoughts race through my bored mind, I get a notification. The same person who ‘liked’ it, has commented on my link and he goes, “Yes, brilliant idea. But another idea is to whack your face with that bottle next time I see you!”.

Yay! My trust is restored again! So, I’m not alone. A lot of people are irritated at these annoying things which make us glued to our phones. This is the very push that made me write this piece. Happy scrolling, everybody!

11 thoughts on “Patience is a virtue – My Facebook news feed”

Awesome start Nithya! So many of which I could relate to. True that these irritating stuff still manages to get us curious and glues us to them. Good way of expressing your thoughts and it details the writers emotions on the article.
Invasion of social media into our lives – *sigh* .

This. Is. Hilarious! I was myself planning to write my feelings about such posts, but hadn’t worked on gathering my thoughts yet. However, even if I had done, I don’t think I could have done a better job than this one.
I have to agree, few cleverly written posts do make us laugh, but now it is simply getting too mediocre, cliched and annoying.
Btw, I didn’t know there exists a word to describe them, ‘Listicles’. 😉 Does it?

Thank you! Encouragement is bliss because this is my first blog article. Yeah, apparently those are called ‘listicles’. Several clone pages of ‘BuzzFeed’ have popped up and that is when it all went haywire! And thanks again for your feedback. 🙂

And yeah, only wanted to mention the portals which did ‘sensible’ coverage.
Active voice is the actual truth, yes. Only because I was baited by that single click.
And your ‘Neyar viruppam’ will definitely be one worthwhile ranting. I will keep in mind. 🙂